By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
The Burning Gates
Parker Bilal (Bloomsbury)
****
Four years and four novels into his double life as a writer of both literary and crime fiction, Jamal Mahjoub, otherwise known as Parker Bilal, has no regrets. Indeed, the Anglo-Sudanese author of such lauded and perceptive literary works as Travelling with Djinns, The Drift Latitudes and Nubian Indigo, admits he enjoys his double life so much: “I don’t think I’ll give it up.” In the guise of Parker Bilal, meanwhile, he has just released the fourth in his lavishly acclaimed Inspector Makana series, The Burning Gates, and says writing under different guises, “gives me a kind of separation wall in my head where I can see ideas on both sides of what is quite a blurred literary divide”.
Mahjoub feels that he is still discovering new elements in the character of Makana, one of the most enigmatic and beguiling protagonists to enter the crime genre in recent times. Indeed, he doesn’t yet know his first name. Makana is an expatriate Sudanese who, having fled Sudan’s hardline Islamist military regime during the ’90s, now makes a haphazard living in Cairo as a private detective. “That’s what makes it interesting for me. There has to be an unknown element that I discover along the way. That’s the stuff that gets your heart beating.”
Another subject that gets Mahjoub’s heart beating is heritage and its wilful destruction – a subject that underwrites The Burning Gates. This high-octane, adroitly layered mystery sees Makana thrust into the dark, murky world of stolen artworks and war crimes when an Egyptian art dealer asks him to locate a fugitive Iraqi general and a stolen painting on behalf of an American collector. Set in 2004, it’s anchored in the events of 2003, says Mahjoub, “when American troops arrived in Baghdad and secured the Ministry of Petroleum while ignoring the museums and libraries”.
“I think 2003 was really a point at which things were triggered that we are still seeing the consequences of. What we are witnessing now happening with ISIS is part of the sort of mathematical progression that come from that moment.”
For Mahjoub, who maintains that “the literary novel is no longer a cental pivot around which our cultural awareness turns,” it all began with Cairo, the city to which, like his fictional protagonist, he and his parents fled to from Sudan, in the wake of the 1989 military coup. What began as a burning desire to write a large epic novel about Cairo, his home for a decade, merged with his long-time love affair with crime fiction. “The scale and historical age of the city, the contrasts between the haves and have-nots; these two worlds going side by side and this sense of injustice of many aspects of life there made me feel that there had to be some real, deep-seated message in all of this. That there was something worth trying to understand about it, and that seemed to me well-suited to the crime novel. There has always been a moral, driving conscience in crime fiction and I think that crime fiction is addressing an urgency that people feel is missing in literary fiction.”
Mahjoub hasn’t lost faith in literary fiction. But he believes people look to the crime genre in particular “for assurance of some kind, for putting the world to rights; things they don’t believe they’ll find in literary fiction”. And in writing his Makana books, he concedes that he too, is driven by a compulsion to counter prevailing misconceptions about the world Makana inhabits. “It’s not that I feel I have an axe to grind, it’s more that I feel there’s a hell of a lot there that’s not coming to light, that people cannot see.
“In that sense it’s not so much about putting things right, it’s about straightening the picture in the frame.”
Follow Bron on Twitter @BronSibree
Book details
- The Burning Gates by Parker Bilal
EAN: 9781408841082
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image: Aisha Seeberg